Homes contain an ever-increasing amount of technology. While visions of smart homes have long caught the attention of researchers and effort has been put toward enabling home automation these technology have not yet been widely adopted despite being available for over three decades. Our research in this area includes studying the current use of technology and automation in homes, building the HomeOS system to provide centralized holistic control of devices and applications used in the home, and developing PreHeat, a home-heating system to improve the efficiency of home heating and save money and energy.

Home heating is a major factor in worldwide energy use. We have built a home-heating system PreHeat, that automatically runs your home theromstat based on a predictive model of when you will be home. PreHeat's goal is to reduce the amount of time a household's thermostat needs to be on without compromising the comfort of household members. PreHeat is a collaboration between the Sensors and Devices group (Cambridge), the VIBE-CUE group (Redmond) and the ASI group (Redmond). The core team comprises A.J. Brush, John Krumm, Brian Meyers and James Scott. Other contributors include Mike Hazas, Steve Hodges, Ashish Kapoor, Asta Roseway and Nic Villar.

To simplify the management of technology in the home and to simplify the development of applications in the home, we are developing an operating system for the home. Our operating system, called HomeOS, provides a centralized, holistic control of devices in the home. It is backed by a HomeStore that simplifies for users the task of obtaining applications and devices that work well with existing technology in the home. HomeOs is a collaboration between the Networking Group and CUE group. The core team comprises Ratul Mahajan, Colin Dixon, A.J. Brush, Bongshin Lee. Other contributors include Sharad Agarwal, Stefan Saroiu and Victor Bahl.